PixlBit

Before the N64 I was pretty much strictly a Nintendo customer, as I never got into the Genesis or Master System.  So I was pretty excited for the N64.  And I really did enjoy it a lot, especially games like Mario 64, Zelda, Banjo-Kazooie and its sequel, DK64, and many more.  

However, a year after the N64 came out, their big holiday title was Diddy Kong Racing.  And as much as I like Diddy Kong Racing, at the time I felt that wasn't going to cut it and I needed another gaming system.  Plus I was reviewing games at The Dallas Morning News at the time, and the N64 wasn't providing enough games for me to review, especially since I was getting paid for it then.  So even though I was a poor college student and really couldn't afford it, that next Spring I got a PlayStation.  That ended up being one of the best gaming purchases I ever made, as I was reviewing games left and right for it after that.  It also ended up being one of my favorite game consoles, with titles such as Tron Bonne, Puzzle Fighter, Brave Fencer Musashi, Namco Museums, Tail Concerto, Ridge Racer Type 4, and many, many more.

So yeah, while I did like my N64 a lot, it really was the first console that made me want another competitor's console.

I learned how to play Chess via Battle Chess, so I could see all the animations.

The other thing that Battle Chess taught me is that I don't like Chess.

I wanted to get Stacking when I played my 360 a lot.  But it fell through the cracks and I never got around to getting it.  There were so many games on the 360!  Definitely one of my favorite consoles, surprisingly.  I've never heard of Headlander, though.

I've always been fascinated by Xevious for some reason.  Not sure why, since I'm so bad at it.  I guess I've always been a Namco fan, even when I didn't know it.

Have you seen the cabinet for the US version of Xevious by Atari.  It's pretty sweet, and what grabbed me to the game in the first place.

Here's a funny childhood story about Xevious.  You remember dot matrix printer paper, right?  And how it was all connected and you had to rip them out via the preforations?  Well, when I was a kid, I got some of my dad's computer dot matrix printer paper.  I spread it out on the floor from the front door to the back door.  Then I got out my pencils and crayons and made a Xevious map on one side and a Zaxxon map on the other side.  Then I would get out my toy spaceships and play 'pretend Xevious' over the printer paper!  Yeah I was a weird kid I guess.  I did get in a little bit of trouble for wasting so much of my dad's printer paper, though!

I read somewhere that Xevious was the first game to use pre-rendered graphics in the sprites.  I always thought the backgrounds you were flying over looked like a golf course, though.

I think I've played nearly every Xevious game in the series except for Solvalou, which used the StarBlade engine.  I especially like Xevious 3-D/G+, and the music in Xevious Arrangement.  Gotta love all the Xevious cameos in other Namco games, too.  Too many to mention here, though.  Did you know that Grobda is a spinoff to Xevious and uses the tanks from that game?  Also I can't believe how extensive the Xevious story is!  They've written whole volumes of books about it in Japan!

You have to have them to play some of the games, that's for sure.  I just don't think they were written very well.  Especially in comparison to say, the Activision Anthology collection.  Man that was a good collection!

Episode 1 is called Plunder and Lightning I believe.  I hope you get a chance to watch TaleSpin.  I really like it.  But then, I'm a big fan of the Disney Afternoon stuff.  

With old games like that, you need to have good instructions.  I don't think many of those instructions in this collection were written very well.

Hey I thought of a cartoon you could watch for the 1920s.  It's TaleSpin.  It's a Disney Afternoon cartoon from the early 90s and it's set in a fictional world that looks like around the 1920s.  It's pretty good.

I enjoyed this one any time my friend rented it and we'd play it.  It's a nice Gradius spinoff.  I played it in the arcade once.  In Japan it's known as Salamander, and when they brought it to the US they called it Life Force and added more organic stuff to it.  Konami liked it so much they re-released it in Japan as Life Force and added even MORE organic stuff to it.  Have you ever seen the sequel, Salamander 2?  I love the first level.  You think you're fighting that eyeball brain with arms again, and then a giant worm pops out and eats it and you have to fight that!

Is that purple spider thing that thing that looks like the glaive from Krull?  Man, the 2600 had horrible graphics.  I couldn't tell what things were half the time when I played it.  And I'm not that big into graphics in the first place!